


5.9 seconds

by tvprince



Category: Ookiku Furikabutte | Big Windup!
Genre: Everyone is Trans, F/F, Fluff, Magical Realism, Other, first confessions, space analogies, trans girl abe, trans girl mihashi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-05
Updated: 2016-05-05
Packaged: 2018-06-06 12:53:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,569
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6754660
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tvprince/pseuds/tvprince
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mihashi Ren is a witch.</p>
            </blockquote>





	5.9 seconds

**Author's Note:**

> an incredibly self indulgent magical realism fic i wanted after reading through my sister's twitter account. 
> 
> UPDATE: JEHAN DREW [ART](http://tjesje.tumblr.com/post/143888425245/the-darkness-of-distance-splotches-where-the) FOR THIS?? IM STILL LOSIN G IT HOLY SHIT ITS GORGEOUS
> 
> i also promised id do a [podfic ver](https://soundcloud.com/whatbusylittlebees/58-seconds) and by god ive done it. so thats available if its yr jam sorry my throat sounds so dry it was

Mihashi Ren is a witch.

Well, that’s what Tajima claims, at least ten octaves too loud even for the baseball field and, _really_ when they’re all grouped around the dugout an indoor voice suffices.  Abe, contentedly busy with polishing the inner crevices of her mitt only listens to half the narration and catches maybe one fifth of Tajima’s exaggerated hand motions through the corner of her eye.

“She sent me to _space!_ ” Tajima insists.  Abe hears a pacifying hum that could only be Sakaeguchi.  “It was like, _WOAH!_ ”

Somewhere behind her, Abe hears Hanai click their tongue and can picture the exact look of wordless disproval that follows most of Tajima’s outlandish statements (“There’s a soda spring in the forest!” “My grandpa saw a U.F.O. last night!” “Fumiki scored Haruna’s number!”).  Baseless, illogical, amusing but otherwise false.  Mihashi stays oddly quiet, but maybe not so odd.  Abe imagines she can hear her fidgeting.

“Don’t say weird things.  Or bully Ren.”  Hanai chastises.  Judging by the affronted gasp Abe hears and, ah yes, she turns her head just enough to see Tajima shocked _and_ offended that the team doesn’t seem to be buying his newest tall tale.  Abe resists the urge to roll her eyes.

“Well, if that’s finished…” and Hanai lists the day’s schedule and Abe listens not with her ears but with her sinew.  She pushes stray hairs under her cap.  She contemplates the state of her dusty cleats.  She drinks just enough lemon water to buzz her tongue.

She doesn’t think of witches.

 

One week later, Sakaeguchi all but sprints across the practice field in the early Tuesday light.  Her eyes bug and her lips fold tight like creased paper.  Abe has half a mind to ask what’s got her shaken up, but Sakaeguchi isn’t looking at her.  She run, run, runs almost right into Tajima (who’s still raking the earth with a sleepy sort of focus), gripping his shoulders.  Curiosity bests her and Abe walks closer, feeling if she were a dog or a rabbit now would be the time for one ear (or both) to lift up and try to capture whatever Sakaeguchi says to Tajima in hurried gasps.

“A-And I saw it!  It was dark and bright and open a-and…” Sakaeguchi looks sick.  Tajima is grinning.

“I _told_ you!” Tajima smiles impossibly proud, slapping his palm on Sakaeguchi’s back.  She only jumps a little before Tajima’s looking past her shoulder toward the gate.

“Ren!  She believes us!”  Abe is almost close enough to be considered within the circle of one offput Sakaeguchi and corresponding Tajima, but turns.  Mihashi indeed stands just past the gate, looking a little scared herself.  Mihashi nods suddenly, jerky and quick like she’s not sure how else to respond before turning tail and skittering to the dugout.  Abe’s lips and eyebrows frown in unison as she turns back to confront the conspirators.

“What happened?” Isn’t whispering like this behind team members’ backs a little unorthodox?  Sakaeguchi never really fit the bill for ‘schoolyard gossip.’  Plus Abe knew her and Mihashi met along the road to walk to morning practice.  Something was up.

Sakaeguchi looks up as if noticing Abe for the first time.  Abe tells herself she isn’t effected (she is) and Sakaeguchi considers.

“I saw… space.” Sakaeguchi bites her lip.

“You saw space.”

“I think... I think _Ren_ sent me there.  For just a moment but!  But it was so _real..._ ”  Sakaeguchi stares past Abe, past the baseball diamond, past everything she _thinks_ she saw (because there’s no way this isn’t a load of bull).

“…right.”  Abe deadpans and leaves the two to follow after Mihashi, to make sure Sakaeguchi’s weird conspiracy theories clear from her head in time for practice.  As if she needs something else to work up her anxiety.  Tajima shouts something about Abe being a nonbeliever to her back.

 

The stories don’t end.  They build like a myth or a mountain and Abe feels irritation and disbelief and curiosity rain like a rockslide of ‘what if’s and ‘impossible’s upon her back each day.  Next is Oki, followed by Suyama and Hamada and Izumi.  Shinooka, Nishihiro, Mizutani, Hanai even, looking dazed and dizzy.  The things they say run similar and familiar.

“It was so dark but—“

“—I could see everything!  Nothing ever seemed so—“

“—clear, not a thing blocking my view.  So far away everything looked like marbles all round and—“

“—hard.  It was so hard to breath I felt like if I opened my mouth I’d—“

“—die out there, but I’d be content with it, y’know?  Like what a way to—“

“‘—go home ’ that was my first thought, but then she blinked and it was—“

“—over the moon and the earth and I’ve never felt so _free!”_

In a matter of weeks, “Ren’s Space Travel” becomes a sort of christening among the team.  Unsurprisingly, Tajima frequents the most trips, enough to sum up a list of “Approximate Conditions For Ren-Ren Space Travel” (Mihashi complains about the nickname.  Nishihiro points out ‘for’ needn’t be capitalized).

 

1) Eye contact for six seconds (Tajima insists it’s actually 5.9 seconds.  Hanai tells him to shut up)

2) Distance of one meter or less (Tajima goes into great detail of the trial and error it took to discover this one)

3) Holding your breath (“It’s like a safety latch on a gun!  Pretty cool huh?”)

4) If either person blinks, it’s over

 

After the main four, proposed rules and scratched out limitations litter the page (apparently Tajima’s been working at this quite a while).  He makes a point to document everyone’s space travels “for scientific research,” Mihashi more often than not right at his side, looking a little overwhelmed, but with peeks of a smile twisting up her lips every time their teammates say something positive about the experience (everyone does).

 

Abe has never seen space.  Well, not in the way everyone else on the team has.  It might not help that she spends the first few months in firm denial of such a thing and more than a little annoyed that _everyone_ ganged up on her for this (frankly unfunny) practical joke.  In the end, she’s persuaded mostly by Shinooka and Hanai’s word (Shinooka makes sincerity a habit and Hanai doesn’t buy a lick of it till the very end either, so at this point Abe has nowhere else to turn).

She’s never seen space, but she makes it a point to _study up_ on it.  Trusting in something she can’t touch or handle remains a new, scary concept for Abe, so she does her best to learn the constellations, the makeup of stars and asteroids, the vortexes of galaxies she wonders if she’ll ever witness with her own eyes.

Sometimes she wakes up hopeful, thinking “Today is the day!” but then during practice and lunch and practice again and catching and pitching and warm hands and cool water and 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 5.8—Mihashi’s eyes flicker away like candlelight and the spell breaks.

Abe pays more attention now, more than ever before (which is saying something) to her interactions with Mihashi.  Their exchanges aren’t bad—they’re good even.  This isn’t first years on a brand new baseball field at the death of summer:  Mihashi stands taller than ever and shakes her head with a pride she begins to believe she deserves and Abe feels empathy for things she finally starts to understand (and patience for those she cannot).  They talk frequently, they spend time together outside of diamonds and classrooms, and the two of them are a _unit_. 

Abe stares at Mihashi’s eyes a lot now, she always has but now she feels almost a rise of guilt, like there’s a hidden agenda she reaches for (but never quite grasps).  Mihashi always looks just slightly off kilter, watching Abe’s nose or forehead or left ear or the maybe the invisible scar right on the edge of her chin ( _Has Ren noticed that?_ She thinks and self consciously runs a finger over the little bump). 

Mihashi never holds Abe’s gaze for more than a stubborn 5.8 seconds (Abe counts every time), her eyes bounce like sparks and Abe remembers campfires in the woods (except this one is on the moon, the craters are freckles and acne scars and the sun lay behind, eclipsed and blinding and looking terribly soft).

(It’s hard not to think in space analogies now.)

(It’s harder not to think how beautiful Mihashi is.)

 

Abe realizes one day, index finger pausing midway through a scientific study on the creation of black holes, that she feels _hurt_.  It comes as a revelation; she fancies herself impenetrable (she is not) and hardened away from ‘trivial sensitivities’ (not even close).  She can’t blame Mihashi or Tajima or even _dry eyes_ , so Abe internalizes the strange isolation of being left out.  She thinks it doesn’t work for her.  She thinks she’s an exception to the rule.  She thinks maybe Mihashi hates her (she knows better, but god it’s so _hard_ not to think it). The train of thought follows a dangerous track so she ignores it as best she can and plows through storms shaped like hexagons and star dust hardened and hurtling towards the earth so fast they burn to ash.

(She dreams of storms shaped like laughter and warm hands. She dreams she is falling towards the earth burning burning burning.  She dreams she breaks past the ozone and the clouds and the ever blue sky to a baseball field in Saitama.  She dreams she is ashes.)

 

It’s humid and Saturday and slow, Abe and Mihashi laying parallel on the floor with stomachs sated with cool fruit and oolong tea.  Abe watches the filtered sunlight sparkle across Mihashi’s arms.  She remembers it rains diamonds on Saturn.

She finds her courage through the earthquake of her own heartbeat.

“How come you’ve never sent me to space?”

The hot summer breeze kisses sweet nothings into the trees looming outside Mihashi’s window.  Somewhere a giant star swallows itself in its own greatness.  Mihashi holds up her hands as if to consider them.  Abe lets her gaze follow over calluses she can map out blindfolded.

“I’m afraid.” Mihashi says after a million years.

Abe breaths slow.  “What are you afraid of?”  She whispers because the room is glass.

Mihashi draws patterns over her own palm.  Abe makes out the beginnings of Orion.  “I never know what’s going to happen.” Her finger stops at Bellatrix.  “It’s terrifying.”

Abe thinks of light that can be devoured.  She thinks of pitchers who walk off the mound.  She thinks of kisses in her dreams in space.  She nods.  “It’s scary.”

Mihashi inhales sharp, her nail digging to cut across Rigel and Betelgeuse.

“I’d still like to try it though.”  Abe says before Mihashi can regret sharing her thoughts.  Before Abe loses her confidence.  “If you’d let me, I’d like to try it.”

Abe takes her eyes off Mihashi for the first time and stares at the ceiling.  She feels a glass window should open up above their heads.  It seems wrong, suddenly, for Mihashi to sleep behind walls of plaster and paint.

The world spins under their backs, but Abe feels super glued to this one point in existence, to this moment in time, to the feel of floorboards and the knots in her gut.

“Alright.” Mihashi says.

They move in tandem, two sets of strings pulled by nervous puppeteers.  Cross-legged, they face each other.  Mihashi stares at that damn scar.  Abe watches the barely-there freckles on Mihashi’s cheeks.  After a beat, they find each other’s hands.  Abe’s thumb sooths the line between Rigel and Betelgeuse and neither mention that the other is shaking.

“On three?”

Mihashi nods.

“One…” The wind picks up outside.

“…two…” Mihashi twines her fingers tight with Abe’s.

“…three.” Their eyes snap up at the same time they both take a deep breath. Mihashi’s pupils twitch like they want to look away, but she stays resolute.  Solar flares bloom across Abe’s cheeks and she wonders if it’ll be enough to distract Mihashi’s jumpy gaze.

_1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 5.8—_

In an instant everything and nothing flashes past in a whirl of colors that don’t have names and emptiness that doesn’t exist.  Abe feels a sudden weight crash down on her chest, constricting and smothering like the claws of a faceless animal and she almost chokes.  If she could move, maybe she would have.  It’s icy and hot in all the strangest of ways, as if icicles form at every bridge of exposed skin only to burn off before she fully notices they’ve sprouted.  In her peripheral vision, the galaxy blossoms as if waiting for this exact moment, this single point in an infinite to _become_.  Waves of azure and magenta of crimson and forest and gold gold _gold_ ebb, slowly at first, then crash and pool and fill and flush all around.  The darkness of distance splotches where the majesty can’t reach, far away stars looking impossibly bright in clutches and pictures across the endless vastness of it all.

Abe assumes it is all very lovely.

Abe can’t take her eyes off Mihashi’s.

Somewhere in the back of her mind, she wonders if that was a rule Tajima’d jotted down:  If you look away it’s over.  It sounds incorrect somehow, but Abe questions how anyone could _possibly_ look away from Mihashi at a time like this.

They drift without moving, the flashes behind Mihashi’s shoulders reflecting the world—all words—onto her cheeks, smudged and gorgeous.  Somewhere along the line Abe grabs her other hand and holds tighter than ever before.  In Mihashi’s eyes lay black holes and dying stars on their last blazes.  In her eyes Abe sees a frozen train of asteroids, a smoggy planet undiscovered, the clearest view of Sirius astronomers could only _dream_ of.

And still Abe see the heat of summers past, of foggy mornings and vapor breath.  She sees baseball fields and a happiness that doesn’t have a form or a name.

_And she sees Mihashi looking at her as if she’s witnessed the exact same thing._

They both draw in a gasp like balloons cut open.  The world falls back under their feet.  The trees outside the window still rustle with all the restlessness of rising winds.  Mihashi and Abe are trembling.

Abe feels the invincibilities of the universe.  “I love you.”  She says.  She’s been thinking it for a while.

Mihashi blinks, but Abe can still see the infinites in her eyes.  She laughs like freedom.  She clutches Abe’s forearms and ducks her head and Abe watches every curl bounce and settle, misplaced tendrils of the sun and she is in love and she has no fear.

“I love you too.”  Mihashi laughs and grins and now they’re both floating.  “I love you too.” She says and they hold each other and shake and bloom.

 

Tajima knows the second Abe and Mihashi walk onto the field Monday morning, fingers brushing, but not holding.

“You saw it.” It isn’t a question.  Tajima grins.

Abe shrugs something noncommittal and bites down her own smile.

“Taka saw it!”  Tajima shouts, jumping and jubilant to announce to the dugout.

 

Later Abe will submit and file a report to Tajima’s growing binder of “Ren-Ren Space Travel Scientific Research.”

 

(She chooses not to disclose how it feels to kiss the universe.)


End file.
